Tarka the Otter

by Henry Williamson

  Underwater he saw two legs, joined to two wavering and inverted images of legs, and above them the blurred shapes of a man’s head and shoulders. He turned away from the fisherman into the current again, and as he breathed he heard the horn again. On the road above the glen the pack was trotting between huntsman and whippers-in, and before them men were running with poles at the trail, hurrying down the hill to the bridge, to make a stickle to stop Tarka reaching the sea.

  Tarka left Deadlock far behind. The hound was feeble and bruised and breathing harshly, his head battered and his sight dazed, but still following. Tarka passed another fisherman, and by chance the tiny feathered hook lodged in his ear. The reel spun against the cheek, re-re-re continuously, until all the silken line had run through the snake-rings of the rod, which bent into a circle, and whipped back straight again as the gut trace snapped.

  Tarka saw the bridge, the figure of a man below it, and a row of faces above. He heard shouts. The man standing on a rock took off his hat, scooped the air, and holla’d to the huntsman, who was running and slipping with the pack on the loose stones of the steep red road. Tarka walked out of the last pool above the bridge, ran over a mossy rock, merged with the water again, and pushed through the legs of the man.

  Tally Ho!

  Tarka had gone under the bridge when Harper splashed into the water. The pack poured through the gap between the end of the parapet and the hillside earth, and their tongues rang under the bridge and down the walls of the houses built on the rock above the river.

  Among rotting motor tyres, broken bottles, tins, pails, shoes, and other castaway rubbish lying in the bright water, hounds made their plunging leaps. Once Tarka turned back: often he was splashed and trodden on. The stream was seldom deep enough to cover him, and always shallow enough for the hounds to move at double his speed. Sometimes he was under the pack, and then, while hounds were massing for the worry, his small head would look out beside a rock ten yards below them.

  Between boulders and rocks crusted with shellfish and shaggy with seaweed, past worm-channered posts that marked the fairway for fishing boats at high water, the pack hunted the otter. Off each post a gull launched itself, cackling angrily as it looked down at the animals. Tarka reached the sea. He walked slowly into the surge of a wavelet, and sank away from the chop of old Harper’s jaws, just as Deadlock ran through the pack. Hounds swam beyond the lines of waves, while people stood at the sea-lap and watched the huntsman wading to his waist. It was said that the otter was dead-beat, and probably floating stiffly in the shallow water. After a few minutes the huntsman shook his head, and withdrew the horn from his waistcoat. He filled his lungs and stopped his breath and was tightening his lips for the four long notes of the call-off, when a brown head with hard eyes was thrust out of the water a yard from Deadlock. Tarka stared into the hound’s face and cried Ic-yang!

  The head sank. Swimming under Deadlock, Tarka bit on to the loose skin of the flews and pulled the hound’s head underwater. Deadlock tried to twist round and crush the otter’s skull in his jaws, but he struggled vainly. Bubbles blew out of his mouth. Soon he was choking. The hounds did not know what was happening. Deadlock’s hindlegs kicked the air weakly. The huntsman waded out and pulled him inshore, but Tarka loosened his bite only when he needed new air in his lungs; and then he swam under and gripped Deadlock again. Only when hounds were upon him did Tarka let go. He vanished in a wave.

  Long after the water had been emptied out of Deadlock’s lungs, and the pack had trotted off for the long uphill climb to the railway station, the gulls were flying over something in the sea beyond the mouth of the little estuary. Sometimes one dropped its yellow webs to alight on the water; always it flew up again into the restless, wailing throng, startled by the snaps of white teeth. A cargo steamer was passing up the Severn Sea, leaving a long smudge of smoke on the horizon, where a low line of clouds billowed over the coast of Wales. The regular thumps of its screw in the windless blue calm were borne to where Tarka lay, drowsy and content, but watching the pale yellow eyes of the nearest bird. At last the gulls grew tired of seeing only his eyes, and flew back to their post; and turning on his back, Tarka yawned and stretched himself, and floated at his ease.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SWIMMING towards the sunset Tarka found a cleft in the high curved red cliff, and on the crest of a wave rode into the cavern beyond. The broken wave slapped against the dark end as he climbed to a ledge far above the lipping of the swell, and curled himself on cold stone. He awoke when the gulls and cormorants were flying over the sea, silent as dusk, to their roosts in the cliff.

  The straight wavelets of the rising tide were moving across the rock pools below the cleft, where under green and purple laver-weed crabs and prawns were stirring to feed. The weed, so placid before, was kicked and entangled by the searching otter. The crab he climbed out with was bitter, and leaving it, he swam into deep water.

  A herring shoal was coming up with the evening tide, followed by a herd of porpoises, which when breathing showed shiny black hides through the waves. Fishermen called them errin-ogs. Once these warm-blooded mammals had ears and hair and paws, but now their ear-holes were small as thorn-pricks, and their five-toed paws were changed into flippers. Their forefathers, who had come from the same family as the forefathers of otters and seals, had taken early to water, shaping themselves for a sealife while yet the seals were running on land. Their young, born underwater, needed no mother’s back to raise them to the air of life, for ancestral habit had become instinct.

  An old boar porpoise flung himself out of a trough near Tarka and fell with a clapping splash on its back, to shake off the barnacle-like parasites boring into its blubber. Near the boar swam a sow porpoise suckling her little one, who, towed along on its back, breathed during every rise and roll of its mother. Tarka caught his first herring and ate it on a rock, liking the taste, but when he swam out for more, the under-seas were vacant.

  For a week he slept in the disused lime-kiln on the greensward above the Heddon water, that lost itself in a ridge of boulders above the tide wash. While he was exploring the fresh water a storm broke over the moor, and the roaring coloured spate returned him to the sea. He went westwards, under the towering cliffs and waterfalls in whose ferny sides he liked to rest by day. Once he was awakened by a dreadful mumbling in the wind far above him. As he lifted his head he heard a whistling noise, as of falcons in swoop. Flakes of scree clattered and hurtled past him; then a stag, and three staghounds. The bodies smashed on the rocks, and were of silence again. Soon the cries of seabirds and daws were echoing out of the cliffs. Ravens flew down, and buzzards, and the air was filled with black and white and brown wings, with deep croaking, wailing, and shrill screaming. They jostled and fought for an hour, when a motorboat, holding a red-coated figure, came round the eastern sheer and drove them into flight. The gulls mobbed Tarka when they saw him slipping down from his resting ledge, but he found the sea and sank away from them. That night, squatting on a rock and eating a conger, the west wind brought him the scent of White-tip.

  At dawn he was swimming under the sea-feet of the Great Hangman; and he followed the trail until sunrise was shimmering down the level sea and filling with aerial gold the clouds over the Welsh hills.

  At dusk the shore-rats on Wild Pear Beach, searching the weed-strewn tideline, paused and squealed together when their sharp noses took the musky scent of water-weasels. They ran off chittering as terrible shapes galloped among them. A rat was picked up and killed in a swift bite. The cub did not want it for food; he killed it in fun. He ran into the sea after White-tip, who had been taking care of the cubs since their mother had been trapped under the waterfall.

  Six hours later Tarka ran up Wild Pear Beach and his thin, hard cries pierced the slop and wash of waves on the loose, worn, shaly strand. He followed the trail over the weeds to the otters’ sleeping-place under a rock, and down again to the sea. In a pool off Briery Cave he scented otter again, for at the bottom of t
he pool lay a wicker-pot, holding something that turned slowly as the ribbons of the thong-weed lifted and dropped in the water. The long blue feelers of the lobster were feeling through the wickerwork; it was gorged, and trying to get away from the otter cub it had been eating. The cub had found no way out of the cage it had entered at high tide, intending to eat the lobster.

  Hu-ee-ic! Tarka did not know the dead. Nothing answered, and he swam away, among green phosphoric specks that glinted at every wave-lap.

  Autumn’s little summer, when day and night were equal, and only the woodlark sang his wistful falling song over the bracken, was ruined by the gales that tore wave and leaf, and broke the sea into roar and spray, and hung white ropes over the rocks. Fog hid cliff-tops and stars as Tarka travelled westwards. One night, as he was drinking fresh water from a pool below a cascade, he was startled by immense whooping bellows that bounded from the walls of mist and rebounded afar, to return in duller echoes as though phantom hounds were baying the darkness. Tarka slipped into a pool and hid under lifting seaweed; but the sounds were regular and harmless, and afterwards he did not heed them. On a rock below the white-walled tower of Bull Point lighthouse, whose twin sirens were sending a warning to sailors far out beyond the dreadful rocks, Tarka found again the trail of White-tip, and whistled with joy.

  Travelling under the screes, where rusted plates of wrecked ships lay in pools, he came to the end of the land. Day was beginning. The tide, moving northwards across Morte Bay from Bag Leap, was ripped and whitened by rocks which stood out of the billows of the grey sea. One rock was tall above the reef – the Morte Stone – and on the top pinnacle stood a big black bird, with the tails of fish sticking out of its gullet. Its dripping wings were held out to ease its tight crop. The bird was Phalacrocorax carbo, called the Isle of Wight Parson by fishermen, and it sat uneasily on the Morte Stone during most of the hours of daylight, swaying with a load of fishes.

  Tired and buffeted by the long Atlantic rollers, Tarka turned back under the Morte Stone, and swam to land. He climbed a slope strewn with broken thrift-roots and grey shards of rock, to a path set on its seaward verge by a fence of iron posts and cables. Salt winds had gnawed the iron to rusty splinters. The heather above the path was tougher than the iron, but its sprigs were barer than its own roots.

  Over the crest of the Morte, heather grew in low bushes, out of the wind’s way. There were green places where among the grass cropped by sheep grew mushrooms mottled like owl’s plumage. The sky above the crest was reddening, and he found a sleeping-place under a broken cromlech, the burial-place of an ancient man, whose bones were grass and heather and dust in the sun.

  Tarka slept warm all day. At sunset he ran down to the sea. He worked south through the currents that scoured shelly coves and swept round lesser rocks into the wide Morte Bay. Long waves, breaking near the shallows, left foam behind them in the shapes of dusky-white seals. Bass were swimming in the breakers, taking sand-eels risen in the sandy surge. A high-flying gull saw a fish flapping in the shallows, with ribbon weed across its head. The gull glided down, and the ribbon weed arose on low legs, tugging at the five-pound fish, and dragged it on to firm, wet sand. Hak-hak! cried the gull, angrily. Tu-lip, tulip! the ring plover arose and flickered away in a flock. Other gulls flew over, and dropped down. Tarka feasted among the noise of wings and angry cries. When he was full, he lapped fresh water trickling over the sand in a broad and shallow bed. Hu-ee-ic! He galloped up the sand, nose between paws. He ran up into the sandhills, where his passing sowed round orange-red seeds from the split dry pods of the stinking iris. Over a lonely road, among old stalks of ragwort and teasel, and up a steep bank to the incult hill, pushing among bracken, furze, brambles, following the way of White-tip. He found the head of a rabbit which she had caught, and played with it, whistling as he rolled it with his paws.

  Already larks were ceasing to sing. When he reached the top of Pickwell down, eastern clouds were ruddy and Hoaroak Hill, seventeen miles away as the falcon glides, was as a shadow lying under the sky. He descended to a gully in the hills, a dry watercourse marked by furze bushes, and thorns, and hollies, growing down to sandhills by the sea. The gully lay south-west; the trees lay over to the north-east, bitter and dwarfed by salt and wind. Under a holly bush, bearer of ruined blossoms and spineless leaves, whose limbs were tortured by ivy thicker in trunk than its own, the otter crawled into a bury widened by many generations of rabbits, and lay down in the darkness.

  The wind rushed up the gully, moving stiffly the blackthorns which squeaked as they rubbed against each other. Dry branches of elderberries rattled and scraped as though bemoaning their poverty. Gulls veered from hilltop to hilltop, calling the flock standing far below on the sands that gleamed with the dull sky. The dark base of the headland lying out in the Atlantic was flecked along its length with the white of breaking waves. The sea’s roar came with blown spray up the gully. Tarka slept.

  He awoke before noon, hearing voices of men. Mist was drifting between the hills. He lay still until a man spoke at the day-dim opening of the bury. An animal moved down the tunnel, whose smell immediately disturbed him. He remembered it. The animal’s eyes glowed pink, and a bell tinkled round its neck. Tarka crawled into the bury and ran out of another hole, that was watched by a spaniel sitting shivering and wet, behind a man with a gun on the bank above. The spaniel jumped back when it saw Tarka, who ran down the gully, hastening when he heard a bark, a shout, and two bangs of the gun. Twigs showered upon him, and he ran on, hidden by the thorny brake. Two men clambered down the banks, but only the spaniel followed him, barking with excitement, but not daring to go near him. It returned to its master’s whistle. Tarka hid under a blackberry bush lower down, and slept among the brambles until darkness, when he left the shelter and climbed up the hillside.

  He ran under a gate to a field beyond, but crossing a rabbit’s line, he followed it through hawthorns wind-bent over the stone bank, to the waste land again. The rabbit was crouching under the wind in a tussock, and one bite killed it. After the meal Tarka drank rainwater in a sheep’s skull, which lay among rusty plough-shares, old iron pots, tins, and skeletons of sheep – some broken up by cattle dogs, and all picked clean by crows and ravens. Tarka played with a shoulder-blade because White-tip had touched it in passing. He ran at it and bit the cold bone as though it were White-tip. He played with many things that night as he ran across field and bank.

  Following the trail he came to a pond in a boggy field below a hill. Moorhens hid in terror when he swam among them. He caught and played with an eel, which was found dead next morning on the bank, beside the seals pressed in the mud by his clawed feet, and the hair-marks of his rolling back. Hu-ee-ic! Tarka ran under a culvert that carried a trickle to a smaller pond in the garden of a rectory. Hu-ee-ic! while clouds broke the light of the moon.

  He climbed round the hatch of the pond, sniffing the tarred wood, and crept under a gap in the wall which ended the garden. The stream flowed below a churchyard wall and by a thatched cottage, where a man, a dog, and a cat were sitting before a fire of elm brands on the open hearth. The wind blew the scent of the otter under the door, and the cat fumed and growled, standing with fluffed back and twitching tail beside her basket of kittens. The otter was scraping shillets by a flat stone under a fall by the road, where farmers’ daughters crouch to wash chitterlings for the making of hog’s-pudding. An eel lived under the kneeling stone, fat with pig-scrap. Its tail was just beyond the otter’s teeth. White-tip had tried to catch it the night before.

  Hu-ee-ic!

  The cottage door was pulled open, the spaniel rushed out barking. A white owl lifted itself off the lopped bough of one of the churchyard elms, crying skirr-rr. An otter’s tiss of anger came from out of the culvert under the road. Striking a match the man saw, on the scour of red mud, the twy-toed seal, identical with the seal that led down to the sea after the Ice Winter.

  Tarka was gone down the narrow covered way of the culvert, amid darkness and
the babble of water. The stream ran under a farmhouse, and through an orchard, under another culvert and past a cottage garden to the water-meadow below. Wood owls hunting far down in the valley heard the keen cries of Tarka.

  Hu-ee-ic!

  Often the trail was lost, for the otters which had gone ahead of Tarka had left their seals on bank and scour before the rain had pitted and blurred them.

  Tarka followed the stream. At the beginning of Cryde village the water was penned above the curve of the road, the pond being kept back by a grassy bank where stood a hawthorn clipped like a toadstool. Swimming round the edge among flags and the roots of thorns and sycamores, he saw a head looking at him from the water, and from the head strayed a joyous breath. He swam to it – a snag of elm-branch stuck in the mud. White-tip had rubbed against it when swimming by. Tarka bit it before swimming round the pond again to sniff the wood of the penstock. He climbed out and ran along the bank, by the still mossy wooden wheel of the mill. They heard his shrill cry in the inn below. A cattle dog barked, and Tarka ran up a narrow lane which led to the top of a hill. In hoof-mudded patches he found the trail again, for the otters had run the same way when alarmed by the same dog. The trail took him under a gate and into a field, over a bank where straight stalks of mulleins were black in moonlight, to land that had forgotten the plough, a prickly place for an otter’s webs. Sea-wind had broken all the bracken stalks. Suddenly he heard the mumbling roar of surf and saw the lighthouse across the Burrows. He galloped joyfully down a field of arrish, or stubble. He travelled so swiftly that soon he stood on the edge of sandy cliffs, where spray blew as wind. He found a way down to the pools by a ledge where grew plants of great sea stock, whose leaves were crumbling in autumn sleep.